"Trivial Changes of Time..."

Don't merely jump on the waves of trend... Guest blog post from GK Chesterton. (ha!)


"It is from the old wrangles of Rads and Reformers and True Blue Tories that modern art has borrowed this queer notion of incessant Progress and each generation crowing over the last. When I read all this confident exposition about new methods that must now supersede old methods; of how Yeats and Swinburne must yield to Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound, just as Tennyson and Browning had to yield to Yeats and Swinburne, I heave a sigh that is full of old and tender memories. ... Anyhow, I have now come to believe in a totally different theory about novelty, and even the necessity of novelty. What puzzles me about current culture is that it ignores the very truths which it exaggerates. ... novelty is not necessarily improvement. It does not necessarily give the man for whom the old things are stale any right to scorn the man for whom the old things are fresh. And there always are men for whom the old things are fresh. Such men, so far from being behind the times, are altogether above the times. They are too individual and original to be affected by the trivial changes of time."

- GK Chesterton